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Cyfy

I was watching a playthrough of Final Fantasy Legend II this week, and the player was commenting about some stuff he’d been watching lately. He brought up the topic of time travel and its theories, stuff like:

1. Time is malleable, and when you go back and change it, then you change the results of the future (this is the most common one).

2. The world exists in multiple universes, and when you go back in time, you go to a universe that is identical to yours but is different, and when you go back, you go back into another universe altogether (slightly less common but still evident, nonetheless).

3. The world exists in the way it is because its course was changed when you already went to the past. Therefore, by going to the past to change it, you’re doing nothing.

The third one, I had not yet thought of. I pretty much just wanted to share. The guy who was playing the game only mentioned one instance in which he saw this theory implemented. I thought it was interesting.

On another note, my friend and I were talking…

We hear all of these Sci-Fi stories about how machines would take over the world. It seems so far off, doesn’t it?

Well, it’s not. It’s already happened. And it’s so subtle. You’re reading this on a machine. I wrote this on a machine. You use a machine to learn the news, whether directly or indirectly. Newspapers are printed with machines. Machines create our music. They play it. They record it. They make our food.

Tangent: The internet controls our lives. Sounds like we’ll be living in it soon. We’ll be tapped into it as soon as we’re born, about a hundred years in the future. Sound familiar?

On another note, I was thinking about the idea of teleportation. It comes down to these two subtopics:

Without machines.

With machines.

If we’re teleporting without machines, then we’re pretty much talking about stopping time, somehow being the only thing that can move, making your moves and then starting time again. Now, there are a lot of things about stopping time. If you stopped time, then everybody’s hearts would stop beating. Then you’d pretty much be the only person alive. Then your heart beats at normal rates, but since your heart is beating multiple times a second, then when you start time again, your heart would probably explode. And then you have the thing about moving in general. My guess is that you wouldn’t be able to, since the gas stops moving mid-air (or mid-vacuum) so you’d be trying to walk through a wall. But theeeennn, if you DID somehow manage to move, then the displaced gas would move aside and there’d be a vacuum behind you wherever you went. So when you started time again, there would be some kind of pull toward your path. Fun stuff to think about, eh?

With machines, one would have to conclude that it would only be possible through the breakdown and reformation of atoms or something simlar. And somehow, when your particles came out at the opposite end, it would have to put you back in order, 100% perfectly or else you’d malfunction or something. Think about it. That’s billions, trillions of cells (including blood and waste) going through a tube connecting two machines together that would probably end up dumping you into a pile at the other end. Wouldn’t that be pleasant? Oh, this reminds me of the near-end of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory:

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One thought on “Cyfy”

Teleporting through space without traveling through time is technically impossible, considering the fact that space and time are linked. Dematerialization solves this problem (you touched on this in your post), but it raises the question of consciousness and continuity.

If you broke me down into my constituent atoms, analyzed them, and transmitted this data to another terminal to be reconstructed, would the being that emerges really be “me”? It would have the exact same body and the same mind (assuming there is no error in the reconstruction), thus it would have the same memories, wants, desires, etc. as I do. But would it have the same consciousness? Would it really be anything more than a clone of me? And is it ethical to destroy one consciousness in one location to create a replica of that consciousness in another? Furthermore, what is “consciousness”? Is it based on some sort of ethereal soul? Or is consciousness a creation of chemical and electrical reactions in the brain caused by physical stimulation? If it is the former, then would this soul transfer during the teleportation? If it is the latter, then can you really claim that the teleported version of me has the same consciousness as I? These philosophical questions are what really should be asked.